[geeks] Microsoft Excel

Sridhar Ayengar ploopster at gmail.com
Fri Aug 10 13:34:46 CDT 2007


For various reasons, I need to use a non-printable character as a 
delimiter in a text file.  I thought ASCII fs (0x1c) would probably be a 
good choice.  It works fine in my scripts and it's easy to generate in 
Servlets.

The problem is that I can't convince fucking Microsoft Excel to import 
files delimited with fs.  I can't seem to even figure out how to get an 
fs character into the clipboard so that I can try pasting it in the 
dialog box.

I'd like to avoid having to run a tr command before every time someone 
wants to open the file in Excel.  Any ideas?

Peace...  Sridhar



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